Coin-op carwash after sunset

I actually took this same photo some time back but I was hand holding my new camera and was also very unfamiliar with the settings, so the shot didn’t come out that good. My camera has a setting called Auto Lighting Optimizer, which is set to Standard by default. It tries to adjust the lighting between dark and light areas of the photo. Works pretty well, from what I can tell. However, in low light settings, such as shooting candlelit subjects or night photography, you have to disable this feature or it will constantly try to correct what it thinks is an under exposed shot. The first two times I was trying to shoot low light scenes the bloody camera battled me at every turn. I couldn’t figure out why it kept ignoring what I wanted. Well, turns out I hadn’t read far enough in the manual, which is actually an oddity for me. Being somewhat anal retentive I usually read manuals front to back before I even pick up the device or attempt to assemble something. This manual, however, is 260 pages. I wanted to take photos, not read. Well, over the weekend I finally got through it and somewhere around the 220 page mark is a word about disabling the Auto Lighting Optimizer when shooting in low light.

So, back to the above photo. I took it last night with the camera on a tripod and the ISO locked at 100. The shutter speed wasn’t an issue because I wasn’t hand holding the camera. I think it came out pretty nice. I purposely waited for the buss to pass to get the streak. I think it would have worked best if I could have gotten the back of the bus in the shot. Oh well, next time. Hope you like it. I mean, you bloody well better like it — love it, for that matter — for all the effort and thought and reading that went into it. 🙂 (kidding, feel free to not love it)

A bit of history: This coin-op car wash is literally at the end of my street, just to the west a hundred yards or so. It used to be a gas station called Jack’s Sunoco, owned by this huge Greek guy named, you guessed it, Jack. Well, my very first job as a teenager long ago was pumping gas at this very gas station, entirely unaware that one day I’d own a house not a block away and live in that house for most of my adult life. He paid me a whopping $4.25 an hour. Seems like another lifetime ago.